


Ask Me

by LittleMissMissy



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen, twissy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 14:22:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11716179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleMissMissy/pseuds/LittleMissMissy
Summary: "You're always moving, always doing, always talking, always drowning out the silence. Why?"





	Ask Me

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first Missy and Twelve fic. Spoilers for everything through The Doctor Falls. Here, have some angst!

When Nardole notified the Doctor that Missy was sulking in front of the farmhouse, he braced himself for the likely possibility of a raging Time Lady. He did not expect to find her dazed and staring out at the horizon.

He advanced cautiously, taking in her appearance as he drew closer. She leaned lazily against a section of the flimsy stone barricade surrounding the premises, focusing on something in the distance. The Doctor looked in the same general direction and squinted through the haze of fog, unable to see anything of note. 

The wind blew a few of Missy's rebellious curls free of their pins, and if she noticed she didn't seem to mind. Mud caked the hem of her skirts and petticoat, and the bow that replaced the cameo at her throat sagged, lopsided. She muttered nonsense to herself in a jumble of languages before switching gears and humming a nameless tune.

She was falling apart. They all were. 

"Missy?" At some point during his approach, the Doctor's attack eyebrows shifted into an expression of concern, and soon he stood close enough to make out the tear tracks marring his friend's cheeks. "Are you crying?"

"Probably." Her tears flowed freely. "It's a thing I do now. Is it normal for me to cry so much? Is this still part of being good? Because I really don't like this bit." Crying was so weak, so human. And she couldn't seem to make it stop. She swiped at her traitorous eyes, angrily smearing her makeup in the process. 

Missy's head was swimming. She felt the bile rise in her throat as she remembered dancing with her previous incarnation on the roof atop the Cyber-converted city. The factories burned, and ash fell like snow. Her younger self raked his eyes over her female form and clutched her hand so tightly she feared her fingers would break if she dared to wrench herself away. All the while she prayed she could bide enough time for the Doctor to regain consciousness and devise some daring escape plan. Rassilon knew she couldn't think clearly enough to form any clever ideas, not with Junior scanning her thoughts or influencing them. 

Her former self—the one with the round face—lurked in the periphery of Missy's mind and left a tingling sensation in his wake like an itch she couldn't seem to scratch. The itch blossomed into an ache the longer she dismissed it, and soon she was left with her head throbbing to the rhythm of her hearts as she felt him pounding on the doors to her mind she had closed off to him. An echo of his voice whispered in her ear as he hammered away at her mental shields: _One two three four._

"Stop it!" she snapped, leaning heavily against the crumbling wall. She took several deep stuttering breaths, trying to calm herself in vain. "I can't keep doing this. It's torture! There's a horrible pressure on my skull every waking moment, and I can't keep fighting it. It's making my eyes leak, and I hate it!"

She didn't realize she was tapping out the rhythm of four until the Doctor rested his hand gently atop hers and bracketed her body with his own. 

"I'm here," he said simply. 

Missy unclenched her fist and allowed the Doctor to thread his fingers through hers. He towered over her petite frame, there was nowhere for her to go, but she didn't feel intimidated or trapped. She felt safe.

"We'll make it out of here, Missy. It will be okay."

She scoffed. "I've thought of every conceivable outcome, and so have you. Remind me: how many of them have a happy ending?"

The Doctor avoided her question. "How much sleep have you gotten in the last week?" he asked instead, not unkindly.

Missy dismissed him with a wave of her free hand, but she refused to turn to look at him, choosing instead to continue staring out into the fields. "Time Lords don't need much sleep. Basic biology. You know that." 

The fog was lifting, and the scenery would have been peaceful if not for the scarecrows scattered through the expanse of grass: humans gutted and crucified, strung up to die. The corpses filled her nightmares in what little sleep she managed to achieve. A few minutes every other day should have been more than enough for her, but she was still exhausted. 

He tried again, "When's the last time you've eaten?"

There wasn't much food available, and when Missy nibbled on a bit of toast at breakfast that morning, her body had promptly rejected it. She felt guilty wasting what was left, so she gave the remaining portion to one of the smaller children. "We need to conserve rations for the pathetic little soldiers. You've been giving your food away, too. I've seen you. When you give something to someone who needs it more than you, that's part of being good, isn't it?"

"Missy." The Doctor breathed her name and it sounded like a prayer from his lips. "You're not taking care of yourself. You're ghostly pale, your clothes are dirty," He took a closer look at her feet, "and how did you go about losing a shoe?"

She narrowed her eyes in thought. "I'm not exactly sure. But if you find it, please let me know."

The Doctor sighed. "Missy, I'm used to you scaring me sometimes. But not like this. I'm really worried about you." 

Missy shook her head. " _You're_ worried about _me_? I'm not the one leaking regeneration energy every time I sneeze."

"I don't..." the Doctor trailed off. "It doesn't happen when I sneeze," he grumbled childishly. He might have imagined a ghost of a smile on Missy's lips before a more pressing detail caught his attention. "And I'm not the one with a bloody nose." 

Missy's free hand trembled as she brought it to her upper lip, finding her fingers sticky and smeared with crimson. She muttered expletives in English and Gallifreyan as she desperately searched her pockets for a handkerchief, coming up empty.

"Look at me, Missy," the Doctor said, gently. "Hey? Look at me, please?"

She surrendered, embarrassed, and slowly turned in his arms but avoided meeting his eyes. He kissed her forehead reverently, and her breath hitched as he projected a blanket of calm to soothe her frenetic mind. 

He produced a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to dab at her nose, gently wiping the blood away. "You're always moving, always doing, always talking, always drowning out the silence. Why?"

He expected some sort of retort. He'd hoped for one: anything other than the air of defeat currently overtaking her entire being. What she gave him was a negligible shrug.

He tried again, "It scares you, doesn't it?"

"You're an idiot," she murmured, lacking the energy to manage a more scathing remark.

"There are lessons to be learned in the silence. Just...listen." He tilted her chin up, forcing her to lock eyes with him. "Just _be_. Clear your mind and be present. Right now. In this moment. Be here with me, Missy."

While his hands found their way around her waist, hers came to rest on his chest. His left heart was weaker than his right; she could feel them both thudding through his many layers of clothing and bandages. 

"If I don't fill the silence, _he_ will," Missy admitted. "It's the paradox. The proximity. He's trying to break into my mind, and I'm like a passenger inside my own body watching the carnage around me. But I'm fighting it. I'm trying. I swear, I'm trying."

"I know. And it's obviously taking a toll on you." The Doctor brought his hand to her cheek and felt her lean into his touch, nuzzling his palm. He used his thumb to delicately wipe a tear from her bottom lashes. "But where there's tears, there's hope."

"But it _hurts_ , Doctor. You were unconscious for days, and it was _agony_. And now? If this is the end for us? For these bodies? You thought we had all the time in the universe. Every star, you once said."

Her eyes seemed so innocent as she stared up at him, and the Doctor swore he could almost see the face of the little boy from so long ago when they first made that promise. And just like that it was gone.

Missy scowled. "You never did ask, you know. Almost a century, and you never even asked. At first I thought maybe you didn't care. Not really."

The resentment in her voice grew stronger and gave the Doctor pause. His confused expression quickly dissolved into one of terror as the implication settled in.

"You're afraid of the answer," she rationalized. "It's not something you'd forget about or decide isn't important. Especially if you're going to dedicate all those years and all that effort, it would have to be worthwhile." She couldn't help the mirthless chuckle that escaped. "So. Ask me."

His answer was immediate, "No."

Something dangerous glinted in her eyes. "And if I tell you anyway? Then what? What would you do with that information? How would that change things? And what sort of answer are you most afraid of, I wonder? Go on. Ask me."

Doubt and tension charged the silence that followed. The Doctor couldn't help but listen to it as it buzzed angrily around them. He held his breath as Missy clenched fistfuls of his coat.

Her voice was somehow tired and demanding all at once. If he cared, he'd say it. She tried again, "Ask. Me."

His question came out as barely a whisper: "Regeneration?"

Missy released him and ran her hands along his lapels in a futile attempt to smooth the wrinkles. A wicked smile returned to her lips as she stood on her tiptoes, her lips meeting the Doctor's in a chaste kiss before whispering in his ear, "Now that would be telling."

It was her turn to thumb the Doctor's tears away when she pulled back. "See what I did there? I gave you hope. And it's good to have hope. Because the Doctor without hope...well, we both know that's more dangerous than any version of me that could possibly exist." 

The Doctor was left stunned. He opened and closed his mouth several times but couldn't find the words. He finally settled on, "That's not fair."

Missy nodded toward the house. "I'll tell you what isn't fair." 

The Doctor followed her gaze over his shoulder and turned to find her previous self watching them from the porch. The former Prime Minister was out of earshot, but the smug look he gave them, along with the wave, communicated that he knew what they had been reluctant to acknowledge.

"To preserve the timeline, he's the only one of us guaranteed to make it out of here alive," Missy conceded. "We have to save him. At least enough so that he can bounce back. He needs to be able to regenerate eventually." 

"Or he never becomes you," the Doctor finished her thought. "And if he never becomes you..."

"Then everything goes to hell." Missy's stifled a sob as a shooting pain sliced across her mind. She stumbled, blindly reaching out for the Doctor. He felt the echoing twinge as he gripped her shoulders, steadying her.

"I have to go," she ground out through gritted teeth. "I have to concentrate." She rubbed temples. "He can't be in here."

"Come on, Lady Version!" the Master called. "I think you and I need to have a chat. Talking is a lot less painful than," he made a vague gesture, waving his hands about his head, "this."

Missy blinked several times as the pain ebbed. "I have to go."

The Doctor caught her hand as she moved to leave and gripped tightly. "Every star?" 

Her eyes twinkled with mischief but the tears continued to fall. She gave him a watery smile as she squeezed his hand and let go. 

The Doctor watched her hobble away, a mess of contradictions. He swore the wind carried her whispered reply back to him. Or maybe she projected it. Or maybe he imagined it. 

_Sounds good._


End file.
